Embodiments herein generally relate to variable documents and more particularly to automated systems and methods for creating variable documents from static documents.
Variable Data Printing (VDP) is a form of on-demand printing in which dynamic elements such as text, graphics, and images may be changed from one printed piece to the next, without stopping or slowing the printing process, using variable information from a database or external file.
In order to take advantage of variable data printing, a customer may request that a vendor convert static documents to variable data documents. Depending on the complexity of the document, the conversion process can be lengthy, because all dynamic data elements need to be identified (and their variations as well) by a designer or developer. The process of identifying and tagging variable data elements in a document can be time consuming. For example, the conversion of 400 static documents to variable documents can take an individual 100-200 hours to tag, which is a serious impediment to the utilization of variable data printing.